One of the most underreported stories of the yearheck, of the past decadeis the looming storage crisis. For as long as hardware manufacturers have been making hard drives, there's been nothing to stop them from increasing areal densities and discovering other techniques to make them bigger and bigger year after year. But 2010 marks the point where all that has changed: The introduction of 2.5- and 3-terabyte (TB) hard drives means the traditional rules no longer apply because the traditional computers can no longer read all the drives. (For more information, see our article, "The Problem with Big Hard Drives.") Just as soon as the problem has reared its end, one jerry-rigged solution has already appearedfrom Asus. The company that ignited the netbook craze and has for years been manufacturing many enthusiasts' favorite motherboards, video cards, and other components has developed a way for owners of Asus motherboards to use all the space on drives larger than 2.19TBeven if their operating system and hardware makeup should make that impossible.

The answer comes in the form of a free 5MB download called Disk Unlocker. When installed, it will recognize and manipulate a too-large drive in a way that any XP, Vista, or Windows 7 computer can understand. That means your system's motherboard doesn't need to be equipped with UEFI rather than BIOS, you don't need to use a separate adapter card (like the kind Western Digital is shipping with its new 2.5- and 3TB Caviar Green drives), and your drive can be formatted with MBR rather than GUID Partition Table. In other words, whether you're using an internal or an external drive, all the limitations you thought were hobbling the newest and largest drives on the market no longer apply.

How does Disk Unlocker accomplish this? The reps at Asus are, predictably, being a bit coy about it. What little we have been told points to the software installing a special low-level driver that lets the space above 2.19TB be addressed to a virtual MBR, which "tricks" Windows into using space it otherwise would refuse to touch. Once you've run Disk Unlocker, you can create a partition of that empty space, and even boot to the driveagain, something the rules of ultra-large hard drives in an MBR-BIOS world tell us shouldn't even be possible.

We tried out Disk Unlocker using our 3TB Caviar Green, and it functioned exactly as Asus promised: We could boot to the drive, and even access all its space. When formatted using MBR, we had to divide the drive into two partitions: one 2.19TB in size, another 800GB or so on its own. And this was on an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard from 2009, running BIOS and without an updated SATA controller. We didn't even have to update the motherboard's BIOS. The app itself is very simple, displaying minimal buttons and offering minimal confusion. You can see exactly what drives you're working with (only qualifying large drives are displayed) and what you're creating.

Having to divide the drive into separate partitions (something we prefer to avoid unless absolutely necessary) is one of the catches with the otherwise impressive Disk Unlocker. Two other equally minor ones are that the software only supports AHCI from Vista and Windows 7, and it won't work with RAID at all. One, however, will be significant for a large number of people: Disk Unlocker only works on systems with Asus motherboards. This means that if you've built your system from scratch and didn't choose Asus, or you own a PC from a big-name manufacturer that doesn't go the Asus route, you're out of luck. We completely understand, and even appreciate, why Asus needed to stick with its own hardware here. But that means Disk Unlocker is still at best an iffy fix for a problem that will only perplex more people as the months drag on.

The best way to solve the 2.19TB conundrum for good remains for motherboard manufacturers to get on the UEFI bandwagon, and ensure that their products have the proper drivers out of the box for users to recognize large hard drives. As far as we're concerned, no hardware maker should have been caught unawares by thisand as they've had nearly a decade to develop, test, tweak, and deploy the proper solutions, there's still really no excuse for this being an issue now. The journey to complete freedom on hard drives of any size is far from over, but Asus' Disk Unlocker at least looks to be an exciting step in the right direction.

About the Author

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his B.A. in Dramatic Writing at Western Washington University, where he also minored in Web design and German. He has been... See Full Bio

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